


The Act of Setting Stones Upright

by Zabbers



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, Meditation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 10:25:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2847620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[from maresdotes] Someone is rearranging all of [Randall's] arrangements on the bulletin boards, messing up his careful lines of thumbtacks, and equal spacing of clippings/photos. Lix tries to think like him in order to put them back and find some sort of zen in doing it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Act of Setting Stones Upright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maresdotes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/maresdotes/gifts).



If there are "running away" stones there must be "chasing" stones.  
If there are "leaning" stones, there must be "supporting" stones.  
\-- _The Sakuteiki, Records of Garden-Making_

 

It isn’t a malicious thing, what happens with the notice boards.

It’s what they’re for: notices, chatter, the messy comings and goings of life in a busy office, an office filled with the sort of people whose job it is to communicate, whose very air is words and images and the exchange of ideas. Of course such a notice board would be dynamic, chaotic even. There are the usual announcements and advertisements and requests, and then because this is a newsroom, there is a whole quadrant of a board slowly being taken over by clippings from the middle sections of various papers ranging from the _Loughborough Echo_ to the _South China Morning Post_. And because this is the BBC, aspirational quotations copied longhand and on bits of typewriter paper appear between legitimate signs and peep out from behind unwanted leaflets; photographs of anything and everything deemed noteworthy appear side by side with sign-up sheets for the amateur cycling league and postcards from colleagues at foreign bureaus.

It’s never the same from week to week, and it can never be claimed to be tidy. Once a month, one of the secretaries goes through and clears the notices that have expired, but some items never do, and in between, things build up. As things always have.

She doesn’t begrudge Randall’s need for order, but sometimes...

Sometimes, it’s a battle. Sometimes, there are cigarette ashes between the notes. Sometimes, unlikely objects are tacked, dangling, by single push-pins like loose teeth. Not malicious. Left by colleagues who aren’t aware it makes a difference.

Lix monitors Randall’s well-being by the state of those wood-bordered territories relative to the progress of the cleaning rota. Somewhere in her mind, along with the political reports and the rolodex, she keeps a record of what she sees almost without looking, graphs the results against an almanac of expectation. She’s trained her eye to catch the inconsistencies that would stop Randall in his tracks.

She doesn’t want him stopped in his tracks, doesn’t want him derailed, so she straightens a line here. Relocates a postcard there. Fixes the edges, aligns the corners.

It’s a sort of gardening, like her mother’s gardening, wandering about the flower beds pulling weeds, trimming trees, taking heads off daisies. There’s a plan she follows like she’s following hedges, but it isn’t her own. In the garden, her mother followed what she would have called God’s plan, and Lix doesn’t have that kind of faith, but her faith is in people and in their patterns, which sometimes are good and sometimes are not, but always have their reasons.

Randall’s reasons--sometimes, Lix thinks she’s cracked them, and sometimes they remain opaque, locked away in Randall’s head, impenetrably, behind the doubled lenses of glass and eye. She thinks if she follows the pattern long enough, if she mouths along with him the lines and colours, mimicking, sounding out, perhaps she’ll learn to read its meaning.

This, too, is Lix’s faith.

She’d watched a monk tend a rock garden once, raking pebbles into waves. It was autumn, leaves had fallen, and after he’d swept and levelled, the gravel crunching under his wooden sandals, he’d stood contemplating the smooth grey surface as though gazing from a mountain into an ocean dotted with islands, rising out of mist. How long it was until he had finally taken up his rake and begun to draw flowing lines around those islands of rock and moss, Lix doesn’t know; only that she’d envied him his peace even while she’d felt only a little of his stillness as that day’s design had grown out of and around the upright stones like guideposts.

Watching Randall is much the same. Watching Randall is like seeing some of her own disquiet projected into space, reshaped, given a chance to set itself right again. Here is a structure within which to work, here is a riot of information, thoughts, moods; here are elements, objects in disarray. Randall arranges it all like he’s sorting stones. Randall makes sense out of disorder.

Sometimes, Lix can follow his sense of order. It’s like a sequence of harmonies, like the rhythm of gravel under foot and brush. It’s a meditation, murmured endlessly below the level of hearing, an irritation if fought, missed if lost, and always in danger of being broken. It’s a concentrating without attending. Resolution without focus. (Randall would hate this metaphor.)

There was a time Randall hated everything, himself especially, and his own anxious asynchrony with the world he inhabited. His dissonance against its polyphonies.

Lix had loved him then, too, but she prefers--it’s better, for both their sakes, when he tends his garden, rakes his leaves and smooths his thoughts, one balanced frame, one stack of notes at a time across the surface of their lives.

And if that takes setting stones so he can shape the water, then Lix will willingly study the rules of composition and carry them into place. If it takes noticing when an object is out of place, and not noticing when he rearranges it three times, well, after twenty years, maybe it’s time she learned to put the cap back on her cameras. And she’s always studied what he’s taught her, even if she hasn’t always been the most diligent of disciples. She's always listened.

She'll sing a melody in counterpoint to his.

And sometimes, pulling push-pins out of layers of paper, lining them carefully along straight angles, polished soldiers on parade...she finds a calm she didn’t know she could feel, a contentment she hasn’t felt in years. She straightens sheets of foolscap, smooths their creases, captures their corners like bed sheets tucked tight. Sees, in the pattern, the spot for a small photograph, otherwise lost under colour and chaos and noise.

When she can’t find her way, he appears to guide her. He’s steady and silent by her side, and they sift pebbles out of running sand, like they’re brushing sense out of clothes made dusty by long-ago siroccos, a lifetime away and only yesterday. Like they’re making a garden. He watches her, lets her work as she sorts and balances, seeing in it perhaps a sort of tranquility.

From time to time, he corrects a placement, provides a solution. At work together like this, they are at their best. Once, she had been the running stone and he the chasing stone. Now, each is at once the upright and the leaning one. Standing coupled like this, grouped like rocks and images, they make the best of brass tacks. They plant small trees. They prune and support. They learn to read the patterns, in song and straight edges and stones. And to make their patterns, day by mindful day.

They do the simple things, and simplify the difficult ones, so they can build the hardest things of all.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from maresdotes.


End file.
